Now to say I was shocked is an understatement, not so much that people can do this because as we all know there are ways around anything. No, I was more shocked that I wasn’t aware of the simplicity of this method. Further googling led me to a few news reports in the US regarding this phenomenon. Needless to say that today I am looking into how to defend against this kind of attack.

Well, Halo ODST has finally arrived here in my homeland. I must admit I have been playing an import of this game for a week now so the novelty has worn off a little bit now (plus listening to those French video’s drove me crazy).

Now.. for all those who did the same (and the ‘odd’ few that decided to download the French version of the game, which I in no way support) you will notice something when you boot into your English version… yes that’s right… the video sequences are still in French. Believe me this came as a little bit of a shock when I popped my English version in this morning.

The reason for this is the Xbox360 has cached the video sequences from the French version of the game onto your hard drive. This can be verified by removing the hard drive and then restarting the game.

So the answer is simple, just reset the cache of your hard drive to listen to the English audio version of this game.

EDIT: I have now found out that the reset cache option can be found by pressing the ‘Y’ button on your hard drive within the ‘Memory Options’. Ignore above link unless still using the older ‘blade’ dashboard.

After many years of being chained to Windows I finally made the switch to Linux for my desktop and I’m glad I did. Vista was providing to be too slow and too bulky for my uses (taking ages to load a folder preview when browsing my files was the deal breaker). So after a bit of searching (and not wanting to maintain yet another gentoo installation) I opted for ubuntu.

Being the tweeker I am, the first thing I wanted to do was to change the default installation of Gnome to suit my needs. All was well until the pesky Main Menu icon (top left corner by default) caught my attention. Googling didn’t really help me much, with people suggesting all kinds such as replacing all .png files with the ubuntu logo present (eww).

After peicing together bits of information from different sites, I managed to change the icon so I thought I would share howto for anyone in the same situation.

To help us with this, gconf-editor is our friend. For any newies reading this, gconf-editor provides a regedit like interface to many configuration settings.

Next step is to search through all the objects looking for an ‘object-type’ of ‘menu-object’. If you can’t find one (which if you are using the default installation you won’t) then search for ‘menu-bar’.

Next, check the option for ‘use_custom_icon’ and update the ‘custom_icon’ field to point to the image you would like to use for your main menu icon.

NOTE: If your object-type is showing ‘menu-bar’, you should change this to ‘menu-object’ for the above to work. This is due to custom icons only being supported on object types of ‘drawer-object’ or ‘menu-object’ (Looking at the description for custom_icon explains this).

So there we have it, simple really. I think many posts explain this technique in a round about way. The issue I found was swapping from ‘menu-bar’ to ‘menu-object’.